History

A notorious mafia killer is now behind bars – but why did it take so long to catch him?

The UK was at the forefront of developing nuclear energy. How then did it fall so far behind France? And is it ripe for a comeback?

Russia’s biggest airline is marking its centenary. But is there much to celebrate?

Each of these artefacts belonged to a member of German society, until that very same society turned against them

How France’s invasion of the Ruhr and its execution of a saboteur 100 years ago fuelled Hitler’s rise

Their heyday was between the 1880s and 1940s. But green concerns about short-haul flights are bringing sleeper trains back in vogue

The Kremlin is using history to justify its war in Ukraine. But Putin’s version could disappear with the flick of a switch

Hidden for nearly 200 years, the embalmed organ that symbolises the bond – and tensions – between Portugal and Brazil has now gone public

An eagerness to put ourselves on the ‘right side’ is reassuring. But dragging the dead before a moral tribunal is pointless

Nobody stuck a poster of Niels Bohr, wild-haired and with his tongue out, on their wall, but the Dane did as much for expanding the range of scientific knowledge in the modern age as Albert Einstein

The discovery of boy king Tutankhamun’s tomb 100 years ago sparked an international wave of Tutmania. Yet the find’s lasting legacy is its reminder of our common humanity

After two world wars, a genocide and two dictatorships, there is no shortage of reasons for commemoration in Germany. And yet there is

The lives of the early 20th-century gentry who fled to safety – but also to poverty – in Paris

The New World’s witch trials are infamous. But the most brutal outbreaks of Satanic panic took place in what is now southern Germany

The city of light has – finally – stopped taking its historic trees for granted and is devising ways of preserving them

Why the most celebrated painter of all time is a criminal’s dream come true

Who really was 'The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo'?

The French Resistance has often been portrayed in a less than serious light, but that could not be further from the truth, as the memoirs of Marie Chamming’s illustrate

Popper never accepted the idea that people did not know about the Holocaust or the gulags, rather they chose not to know. For him, knowledge was a moral obligation

In Rome, to remember the past and our common humanity, sometimes you must look down

The man who oversaw the breakup of the Soviet Union was an apparatchik who wanted to keep the Communist Party in power, says former head of MI6

Fast food or multicultural icon? Take a slice of European history via the intriguing tale of the doner kebab

Ten days before Hitler’s suicide, Felix Hartlaub disappeared. But his notebooks live on

A century ago, the most famous Irishman in the world was shot in mysterious circumstances

What happened when pianists from Ukraine and Russia met at a competition set up by a Texan who wowed Moscow at the height of the cold war?

One of the darkest moments in the continent’s history took place less than 30 years ago. Could history be repeated in Ukraine?

It’s impossible to understand France and Macron without understanding the General

How Stonehenge helps to explain Britain’s place in the ancient world

The building of circular structures seems to have coincided with the exchange of a nomadic lifestyle for a more settled one

Our columnist hopes that digitising Holocaust archives in a new government project will help people “never forget” the horrors of the Nazi genocide

A new exhibition reveals the secrets of a forward-thinking heiress whose taste and beliefs transcended her patriarchal age

The Allies beat a Russian blockade in 1948. Now it is incumbent on Germany to help lead a new wave of aid